Automating work: Key Takeaways
Authored by Tony Doyle based on an original piece by Brian Safron and Cheryl Wilson from IBM.
This blog is part of an Automating Work series. In part 1 we looked at ‘What it means and why it matters’, Part 2 ‘What does Automation success look like?’ Part 3 ‘Where to start?’ and Part 4 ‘What can automation specialists IBM and Insight 2 Value provide?’
In our 5th and final blog in this series, we wrap things up with some key takeaways and invite you to reach out to us to organise a Business Automation Readiness Workshop to help your organisation accelerate your journey and plan your next steps.
Key Takeaways
- It’ll be hard to avoid automation if you want your business to grow.
It’s not a fad. For many companies and industries, it’s essential. - Choosing where to start with automation can take work, but having a plan makes the choices easier. The things you do often, and the ones that noticeably improve customer or employee experience, are the primary candidates for driving growth with automation.
- Automation isn’t one big launch, it’s an incremental journey. You’ll learn new things each time you extend your automation.
- Begin with an end in mind. Make sure that first project is part of a significant front- or back-office operation for which you’ve mapped out the desired state or experience.
- Automation can make your employees more productive. You can apply automation to support your people and remix work— blending automated and human processes—in a way that drives growth without hiring more staff.
- Complex work needs integrated automation. Cross-enterprise work, such as loan origination, claims processing and transportation logistics, creates complex challenges. Using integrated automation to streamline those operations can result in significant benefits.
- Automation enables scalability, and scalability enables growth. Scale means numbers, such as more customers and more units moved. But through the lens of automation, scale also means options, more loan types, more policy types, more destinations, more choices. When you provide more options, you can reach customers who hadn’t considered buying from you before.
- AI is starting to transform automation. Don’t wait too long to experiment, to start applying AI to automation. It’s not a make-or-break feature of successful automation—yet.
What Next?
Schedule a half-day free-of-charge Business Automation planning workshop – Insight 2 Value are automation specialists. We’ll sit down with you to understand your current cost models and work through the potential to eliminate your sunk ECM costs and build a Return on Investment model to accelerate your move to a consumption-based cloud platform. We’ll also help you navigate the technical steps you’ll need to take to minimise business disruption and explain the different options available to you in adding Business Automation into your overall Cloud Strategy.
